READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  Photographs of the show by Jody Jane Stitt fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne Review by Philip Harvey   The nighttown episode of Ulysses, set in the red-light district of Dublin, invites the reader by every imaginable literary trick or treat to experience both the strange otherworld of the Hibernian Metropolis and the inexplicable creations of the individual unconscious. In his schema for the novel, James Joyce prescribed the creative technique ‘hallucination’ for this episode. Hallucination is an abiding form of character presentation (both animate and inanimate characters) throughout. It is also, in Flaubertian manner, an effect whereby Joyce would induce, seduce and influence the sensitive reader. But how do you make hallucination happen onstage?   One answer is in this year’s Bloomsday in Melbourne production. The collective obsession of the scriptwriters for this episode, the longest in the novel, has prompted all their best and worst instinc...

  Review by Philip Harvey first published in Text, Vol. 29, Issue 1, April 2025. Thanks to the editors Aidan Coleman and Verity Oswin.   Kevin Hart ‘Lands of likeness : for a poetics of contemplation’ University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023   ‘Dark-Land : memoir of a secret childhood’ Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2024   I   The copious, sprawling, adventurous Gifford lectures found in Kevin Hart’s ‘Lands of Likeness’ are claimed to be focused in the first instance on contemplation, and then on contemplation and modern poetry. In other words, two of the abiding preoccupations of this author: (1) the primarily religious question of prayer, how we as humans relate to God and the world; and (2) why we turn our language into poetic forms, and why we do that in the context of a world recovering from modernity.   However, the lectures chart the altering understanding of the term ‘contemplation’ itself, with strong accent on cultural definitio...

  Emily Brontë (1818-1848) Portrait by Branwell Brontë   A paper and poetry reading given at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of the series ‘Poets and the Faith’ on Tuesday the 13 th of August 2024. “Darkness was overtraced on every face”   Darkness was overtraced on every face Around clouded with storm and ominous gloom In Hut or hall smiled out no resting place There was no resting place but one – the tomb   All our hearts were the mansions of distress And no one laughed and none seemed free from care Our children felt their fathers’ wretchedness Our homes one all were shadowed with despair   It was not fear that made the land so sad   The great majority of poems written by Emily Brontë are short expressions of desire, solitude, separation, isolation, hostility, distress, loss, longing, anguish, tempest, hopelessness, suffering. Readers know about these states of being from her novel. It is no secret ...

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-18610 Portrait by an unknown artist after Field Talfourd   A paper and poetry reading given at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of the series ‘Poets and the Faith’ on Tuesday the 13 th of August 2024. Another poet named Emily from this time lived across the ocean in Amherst, Massachusetts. She spent even more time cooped up at home than Emily Brontë, whether by choice or chance. I mention Emily Dickinson because she directed that the poem we have just heard be read at her funeral. Also, as it happens, later in her life Dickinson had a portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning hanging on her bedroom wall.    In 2009 in Great Britain, Carol Ann Duffy was named the first woman poet laureate. 159 years before, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was nominated the first woman laureate, but the job was given to Alfred Tennyson, the favourite of Queen Victoria. At the age of four Elizabeth Barrett is making up fully formed...